In uncertain times, Joya asks, ‘what if it all works out?’

There is no shortage of reasons to be afraid right now. Wars dominate headlines. Inflation continues to rise. Job markets feel unstable. Somewhere between the political uncertainty and endless doomscrolling, hope has become strangely unfashionable. Cynicism feels easier and safer, even.

For Hong Kong-born indie pop artist Joya, 32, those fears became impossible to ignore while preparing for one of the biggest changes of her life as a first-time mother, along with her wife. “What kind of world are we bringing our child into?” was the question that loomed over the two queer Asian women.

But instead of spiraling deeper into that fear, that uncertainty became the very reason to create. Joya chose to ask herself a different question, one that would eventually become the foundation of her upcoming EP, What If It All Works Out?  “Instead of thinking about everything that could go wrong, we could instead focus on the hope and the joy that this experience is giving us as a couple,” Joya shares. “It's also shown me that I can still have these multifaceted sides of me, and it doesn't go away when I become a mother.”

Choosing hope over fear

Joya says that the birth of her child gave her a stronger sense of boldness and clarity. With less time in the day, she’s become more intentional about how she spends her energy and wants everything she creates to carry purpose and meaning. This naturally shaped the music she wrote leading up to her baby’s birth late last year.

The question, “What if it all works out?” was shaped by the realities of building a life as a queer couple raising a child in Hong Kong. While she says she feels grateful that queer families are able to exist openly there, many everyday systems still require same-sex parents to navigate forms, schools, and structures that are not designed for them. However, Joya says her art is not blind optimism. It’s intentional hope. One that acknowledges uncertainty without surrendering to it, and one that dares to imagine joy despite the instability surrounding it. “I want it to be hopeful, but not naive,” she explains. “I wanted it to feel childlike, but not childish.”

That distinction matters deeply to Joya, whose artistry often lives in contradiction and in between spaces. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she grew up surrounded by overlapping cultures. She attended school in English, learned Mandarin, and spoke Cantonese and English at home. Her parents filled car rides with artists like Simon & Garfunkel, Carole King, and Queen, while Cantopop ballads and karaoke culture formed the soundtrack of the city around her. “Hong Kong is the ultimate east-meets-west city,” she says. “Growing up, I just kind of absorbed all these different cultures unconsciously.”

Too eastern for the west, too western for the east

Music entered her life early through musical theater. As a teenager, she performed in productions like Rent and Spring Awakening, eventually landing opportunities to perform on large stages alongside Cantopop artists. “I distinctly remember feeling like I was very much comfortable and at home in that environment,” she says. 

Still, pursuing music professionally never seemed realistic. “I came from very open-minded parents,” Joya says, “but out of care for me, music or the arts were never really seen as an option professionally.”

Instead, she pursued political science and global health at Northwestern University in Illinois, eventually interning at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, the UN agency responsible for protecting and supporting refugees and asylum seekers, before pivoting to work in tech, a job she still balances today alongside music and acting. It wasn’t until the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic that music quietly returned to the center of her life. “Work was soul sucking in many ways,” Joya recalls. “There was no social output or input, and I was just writing songs.”

Encouraged by her girlfriend—who is now her wife—Joya began uploading music online. One of her first songs was shared through actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s collaborative art platform HitRecord, where he personally commented on her work. “That was kind of the first impetus,” she says. “I thought, ‘This Internet thing is so great. It’s bringing people from all over the place, and they’re responding to my music.’”

Five years later, Joya has built a growing international audience through warm and confessional storytelling that feels both intimate and universal. Her music carries the approachability and live charisma of Olivia Dean, paired with a rich vocal range reminiscent of Laufey. Her indie pop songs blur the lines between Hong Kong and the Asian diaspora. She describes herself as “too eastern for the west and too western for the east,” a feeling that extends beyond geography into identity itself. “I’ve kind of had to find my own little lane because I couldn’t fit into anything that previously existed,” she says.

Early in her career, she struggled with pressure from the music industry to define her genre, audience, and identity, but eventually realized that focusing too much on labels made her work feel less authentic. Instead, she now prioritizes honesty in her songwriting and trusts that the right audience will connect with her naturally. 

Reclaiming faith through love

That “in-between” feeling also shaped Joya’s journey with queerness.

Although she grew up around LGBTQ+ communities through musical theater, Joya says she never imagined herself as part of them. Raised in both a traditional Chinese environment and a Christian household, queerness felt distant until she got to university, where a woman confessed romantic feelings for her. “My brain just went, ‘Wait, what?’” she says with a laugh. “I was personally very shocked.”

The experience triggered what she describes as a years-long identity crisis marked by depression, guilt, and fear over how her family and faith would respond. “I had grown up as kind of that perfect daughter,” she says. “So this was a huge dark cloud hovering over me.”

Part of the pain came from hearing harmful rhetoric within church spaces. Joya remembers sitting in Bible study groups during which people warned others about those with “homosexual tendencies.” Eventually, she left that church and began rebuilding her relationship with faith on her own terms, reading books such as God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines and seeking stories from other queer Christians who had gone through similar journeys.

Joya says reconciling queerness and faith requires strong support, especially for many who go through painful experiences with the church. But for her, her faith never disappeared. Describing it as an “inherent fact, like the sky is blue,” she says being queer never erased her relationship with God. If anything, her relationship with her wife deepened it, allowing her to discover new parts of herself and experience love in a more honest and meaningful way. Today, she says she experiences faith differently, not through fear or shame, but through pure love. “I actually think I experience more of God’s love now than I was able to before,” she says. “Because now I’m just me, which is truer in the sense that God made me this way. And God has only brought good things and wonderful things through this relationship.”

The radical power of ordinary joy